Theorizing the Contemporary

Created in 2012, Theorizing the Contemporary seeks to extend the horizon of social analysis in new directions, including challenges to what constitutes "theory" in the first place. Theorizing the Contemporary series are reviewed by the editors of Cultural Anthropology; series editors must be current members of the SCA.

How to Submit

View the submission guidelines. Please email [email protected] with any questions.

Coastal Futures

Coastal Futures

Over the last fifty years, efforts to create, plan, and manage coastal zones have multiplied globally in the face of threats posed by intensifying development a... More

Plantationocene

Plantationocene

In what ways does the Plantationocene offer an analytic for specifying a planetary condition? Driven by this question, this collection of short essays provides... More

HandsOn: Touching the Digital Planet

HandsOn: Touching the Digital Planet

HandsOn is about the extraordinary ways our fingers and hands sense, guide, and grip our digital world. In this series we examine the tensions and connections b... More

Disability as Rupture

Disability as Rupture

Disability offers opportunities to reconceptualize ethnographic practices and anthropological projects. Actualizing these opportunities requires allowing disabi... More

Graphic Ethnography on the Rise

Graphic Ethnography on the Rise

We are witnessing a new wave of ethnographic, multimodal creativity inspired by comics, graphic novels, and creative visual arts. The growth of this "graphic-et... More

Ecologies of War

Ecologies of War

This collection, Ecologies of War, extends ethnographic attention beyond “war itself” to include forms of war that are often unrecognized as such—in everyday ex... More

Sustaining the Momentum: Reparative Justice for European Colonialism and Slavery

Sustaining the Momentum: Reparative Justice for European Colonialism and Slavery

When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the U.S in summer 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, the ripple effect around the world was stunning. Di... More

Art and Ethnographic Forms in Dark Times

Art and Ethnographic Forms in Dark Times

What are the ethnographic arts through which we know and express the worlds we encounter? How does ethnographic experience become translated into/as art? How ca... More

Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction

Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction

The rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus reminds us, once more, of the porous boundaries between species, and the social and ecological disasters of growth-driv... More

Emptiness

Emptiness

This series argues that emptiness is emerging as a concrete spatial-temporal coordinate in the global landscape of capitalism and state power, and a heuristic d... More